Why Do We Need Ordinary Pipes?
When we make a child of a process using fork(), the address space of the two processes becomes different. One way to communicate between parent and child is piping. Ordinary pipes are used in inter-process communication (IPC) because they are easy to create, efficient in transferring of data, and flexible. When processes using these pipes terminate or finish their communication, the operating system automatically releases and deallocates the resources associated with these pipes. This includes the memory used for buffering data and the data structures used for managing the pipe. Because of this automatic cleanup and resource deallocation, ordinary pipes are considered more resource-efficient compared to other inter-process communication (IPC) mechanisms that may require manual resource management.
Demostrating Bidirectional Communication Using Ordinary Pipe
An ordinary pipe is one of the methods Inter-Process Communication(IPC). Ordinary pipe allows two processes to communicate with each other (mainly parent and child) in which one process writes from one end and the other reads from the other end, resulting in unidirectional communication. They are a lightweight and efficient way to communicate between processes and are also known as anonymous pipes or unnamed pipes. They are volatile and are destroyed when either of the two processes (ie child or parent) that created them terminates.